What do you believe?

[Guest]

So you're from Florida?

[Guest]

God= No
Jesus= No
Ghosts/Spirits/Souls= No
UFO's/Aliens= Yes
Resurrection= No

That pretty much sums it up for me :icon14:

[Therac-26]

God=No
Jesus=A person existed, but was no more divine than i am
Ghosts/Spirits/Souls=Fuck no
UFO's/Aliens=Hypothetically possible, but they are certainly not abducting trailer trash and giving them rectal probes
Resurrection/Reincarnation=Negative

I that's the "Walking Bag of Meat" view of human existence..

I belive I need some more coffee right now, though.

[ajerara]

I believe yes to all, although the way Christianity has behaved to the people of other religions I think is a mistake. I believe that Jesus was an illumined master and there have been others as well ( Buddha, for one). I believe people and animals have souls, and that the soul is the reflection of God in the individual. As far as ghosts and spirits, I do believe they exist, but don't put much attention on it, I think our time is better spent living well and helping others where we can. I also believe the same on UFOs and aliens, they exist, but is it really going to make your life better by obsessing over it? Whatever, as long as they leave me alone I'm glad to leave them alone.
Resurrection, yes, I believe that Jesus was an illumined master who has control over matter and was capable of rearranging molecules back into a living body. Beyond physical resurrection there are many other types of resurrection, the most applicable one to us being to get rid of the things that make you unhappy and hold you back, and resurrect yourself in a better, happier form.

[Grandpa Stu]

god: undecided
jesus: he was real but like therac said he was just an average guy, pickin up dog poop, hoping its hard.
ghosts/spirits/souls: i believe in a soul but that's about it
ufo's/aliens: there is life on other planets, that's about as far as i'll delve.
ressurection: no, but reincarnation, possibly.

[tnf]

Read a book like Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. He pretty much sums up my take on things. Pretty laid back, not out to say the rest of the world is necessarily going to hell if they don't attend a given church or whatever, and having no problem whatsoever maintaining my faith while looking at the world through the eyes of a scientist.
Lewis takes a pretty logical approach to the issue.

[tnf]

By the way, despite the vastness of space, there are some strong scientific reasons that life out there is probably very rare.

[Therac-26]

Read a book like Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. He pretty much sums up my take on things. Pretty laid back, not out to say the rest of the world is necessarily going to hell if they don't attend a given church or whatever, and having no problem whatsoever maintaining my faith while looking at the world through the eyes of a scientist.

I don't have any intellectual problems with religion and spirituality. My rejection doesn't come from an Athiest point of view -- it's just, I've had to put up with my mother my whole life, who is an Anglican (Episcopelian for you Americans) minister and pretty much decided to do that for most of my childhood instead of be a mother. Umm, yeah, never mind, I got issues there. :icon32: :icon32:

[^misantropia^]

By the way, despite the vastness of space, there are some strong scientific reasons that life out there is probably very rare.

That is, life that's advanced enough to communicate with us.

[tnf]

Now look at it 'scientifically'. There is no 'god'... forces are very weak and it is the 'strength in numbers' that counts. Gravity is one of the weakest powers known. Yet it can tear 'time fabric' if theres enough of it (collapsed star)

Thanks for explaining that.

[tnf]

By the way, despite the vastness of space, there are some strong scientific reasons that life out there is probably very rare.

That is, life that's advanced enough to communicate with us.

No, life in general.

Again, I'll refer to the book "Before the Beginning" by Sir Martin Rees - who is not a religious man.

I didn't say non-existent, by the way, I said very rare. Big difference.

[+JuggerNaut+]

Crystal Lite. cuz i believe in me.

[^misantropia^]

I didn't say non-existent, by the way, I said very rare. Big difference.

You think so? It doesn't take much to start a self-sustaining chemical reaction, which is the foundation for life.
PS: you might want to replace 'rare' with a concrete number.

[[xeno]Julios]

By the way, despite the vastness of space, there are some strong scientific reasons that life out there is probably very rare.

rare is a relative term neh? Even after employing drake like predictions, it's hard to assess what rare entails.

I guess you could use a hierarchy of frequency of various phenomena:

particles are abundant

stars are less abundant

galaxies are less abundant

etc

etc


life would be somewhere down there, relative to stars and galaxies, but up there, relative to other phenomena which we may not be aware of.

Perhaps in terms of expression of complexity, life is the highest form in the universe, although I'd assume that high levels of complexity are virtually synonymous with life.

Yea i guess life is pretty rare, but there may still be a staggering number of independently evolved intelligences that exist "cotemporaneously" (whatever that means with vast distances) and even more if we consider the entire history until "now".

[tnf]

By the way, despite the vastness of space, there are some strong scientific reasons that life out there is probably very rare.

rare is a relative term neh? Even after employing drake like predictions, it's hard to assess what rare entails.

I guess you could use a hierarchy of frequency of various phenomena:

particles are abundant

stars are less abundant

galaxies are less abundant

etc

etc


life would be somewhere down there, relative to stars and galaxies, but up there, relative to other phenomena which we may not be aware of.

Perhaps in terms of expression of complexity, life is the highest form in the universe, although I'd assume that high levels of complexity are virtually synonymous with life.

Yea i guess life is pretty rare, but there may still be a staggering number of independently evolved intelligences that exist "cotemporaneously" (whatever that means with vast distances) and even more if we consider the entire history until "now".

Yes, very relative. I am trying to say that the universe is not *necessarily* teeming with abundant life simply because it is so vast.

[tnf]

I didn't say non-existent, by the way, I said very rare. Big difference.

You think so? It doesn't take much to start a self-sustaining chemical reaction, which is the foundation for life.
PS: you might want to replace 'rare' with a concrete number.

Here, let me just quote Martin Rees. He is smarter than you and I, so we should listen to whatever he says without question.


PS: You might want to give some specifics on what "much" is in regards to starting a self-sustaining chemical reaction that might spawn life. And don't use Miller's experiment.

And now, here it is:
*********************************************
In the book Before the Beginning. Our Universe and Others by Britain's Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, one problem, which has fascinated us, is the question of the existence of intelligent life outside of Earth. Here is Rees' exposition on the question;

WHY INTELLIGENT LIFE COULD BE RARE

There are actually quite cogent reasons to suspect that intelligent life is rare. One old agreement is prompted by the great physicist Enrico Fermi's question, 'where are they?' Many stars are several billion years older than our Sun, so evolution on other sites should have had a head start over us. Why, then, haven't aliens visited us, or at least created signals or artifacts that betray their presence clearly?

A quite different argument that advanced life is rare comes from Brandon Carter, an expert on black holes... His starting point is the well-known fact... that our Sun is about halfway through its life. In other words, the time we have taken to evolve is (within a factor of 2) the same as the Sun's total lifetime. Carter thought it strange that these two times came out roughly equal. Humans are the evolutionary outcome of an immense number of generations of the successive species that were our pre- cursors. The Sun's lifetime is fixed by quite different (and much better understood) physical constraints. These two timescales could, a priori, have differed by many powers of 10.

Carter offered a new perspective on these timescales. His argument goes like this: It would seem an unlikely coincidence that the typical time for emergence of intelligence should be the same as the lifetime of a star: the processes determining these two timescales are quite unrelated. The typical evolutionary timescales would (one might have guessed) have been either much shorter or much longer than the Sun's total lifetime. If it were much shorter, then we would be laggards - Fermi's question would have to be confronted squarely. On the other hand, if the biological timescale were typically much longer than stellar ages, evolution on most planets would not get very far before their parent star died. We would then only be here because, on Earth, the key steps in evolution had all happened especially quickly. Intelligent life, of the kind that evolves on planets around stars, should therefore be rare.

*******

All I'm doing is presenting an idea about the rarity of intelligent life aside from the usual "There is no other life because God made us special here in his own image and that is what the Bible tells me" stuff.

Email this guy if you have major issues with the argument:
http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/IoA/staff/mjr/

[tnf]

I didn't say non-existent, by the way, I said very rare. Big difference.

You think so? It doesn't take much to start a self-sustaining chemical reaction, which is the foundation for life.
PS: you might want to replace 'rare' with a concrete number.

By the way, if you want to read up on self-sustaining chemical reactions being the foundation for life, why don't you take a look at my post about that topic in the ID thread?

[[xeno]Julios]

Fermi's argument never held much weight with me, for the reason that our existence is only a tiny slice of the grander temporal scale of the universe.

There could be trillions of other canditates that aliens might be investing their resources in investigating.

Afaik, it's only been a matter of a century or so since we've started emmitting telltale signals into space. That means that an alien species would have had to be within 50 lightyears of us to have received the signals and visited us (assuming the aliens traveled at the speed of light). Even if they were choosing candidates based on criteria other than explicit telltale signals (such as solar system configuration), it is plausible that they'd never get to us before our sun died.

As for the aliens themselves establishing universal beacons, that's a more interesting argument. But we've only been monitoring the skies with technological enhancements for about 4 hundred years, and considering all the background electromagnetic noise, the chances of happening across a signal that may originate billions of lightyears away seems slim to me.

Carter's points seem good, but panspermic possibilities offer a way to avoid the limitation of a star's life. As for the possibility of us being laggards (in which case a sun like star has more than enough lifetime to support the emergence of life), I don't see how that forces us to confront Fermi to any more significant degree. As I noted above, due to the sheer number of candidates that aliens might be choosing from (or happening upon), it is arguable that they'd never get to us, laggards or not.

[tnf]

Fermi's argument never held much weight with me, for the reason that our existence is only a tiny slice of the grander temporal scale of the universe.

Fermi's argument is not the focus of the piece, though (edit: nvm it is part of the laggards bit with Carter's...). And it never held weight with me, either.

[tnf]

And how do you envision 'panspermic' possibilities offering a means to avoid the limitation imposed by stellar life cycles?

[Keep It Real]

yall need Jesus in your life, either that or the 40 cal put the desert eagle in your life :icon7:

[^misantropia^]

PS: You might want to give some specifics on what "much" is in regards to starting a self-sustaining chemical reaction that might spawn life. And don't use Miller's experiment.

Won't do. It's not the best example either; he only managed to create simple amino acids which you can't really compare to complex cellular life. A better one might be the catalystic properties of RNA but admittedly, it's debatable if bare strands of RNA can survive in a primordial soup.

To answer Fermi's question: what makes you assume they're still here? How long can a civilization survive before it collapses? Artifacts, remnants? Space is big... where to start looking?

Regarding Carter's stance: life on Earth didn't evolve particulary fast. It took nearly two billion years before more complex life emerged. Intelligent life taking time to develop is not really an issue: our sun has entered the second part of it's life after five billion years but an average red dwarf can burn for a hundred billion years (their cycles are more stable too).

[^misantropia^]

By the way, if you want to read up on self-sustaining chemical reactions being the foundation for life, why don't you take a look at my post about that topic in the ID thread?

I'd love to but what is this thread you speak of?

[[xeno]Julios]

Intelligent life taking time to develop is not really an issue: our sun has entered the second part of it's life after five billion years but an average red dwarf can burn for a hundred billion years (their cycles are more stable too).

I think the issue is that according to some lines of thinking, a star like our own sun (mass/temperature) is one that is most suited to fostering life.

[^misantropia^]

Any specific reasons why it would have to be a G-type star?